James Gunn’s Superman is boring as fu*ck.
Bring Zack Snyder back already
Sometimes—rarely—I like a movie so much that I know I’ll go back to the theater for a second viewing before it’s out of theaters. That was the case with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Other times, I go online and pre-order the 4K Blu-Ray, as I did after seeing the recent How to Train Your Dragon remake and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
The other question I’d like to ask is whether I should encourage friends and family to see a movie in theaters or wait until it’s available online (unless it’s a streaming movie, obviously). In some cases, of course, I don’t recommend it at all. I’m sure you can make a star chart of my likes and recommendations. A movie I rewatch gets 4 stars. A movie I pre-order to watch at home gets 3.5 stars. A movie I recommend waiting until it’s available online gets 3 stars. Anything below that… well, forget it.
I really want to love James Gunn’s Superman, but I won’t be going back to the theater to see it again, and I won’t be pre-ordering the 4K Blu-Ray, and I won’t be telling any of my friends or family to go see it, and honestly, I can’t even recommend waiting for streaming. This is a movie you can safely skip. Go back to the 1978 film. That nearly 50-year-old film flies in the way this one limps along, unsure of exactly what it wants to be, what tone it should take, and why it exists in the first place. It has its moments. It has some great laughs and fun action, but the more I think about it, the more I’m genuinely confused about how this happened, how Gunn and DC could have completely missed the ball.
I wanted to love Superman, but I still cringed after every new trailer for the flagship DCU film. It was hailed as a return to form for DC after years of mediocrity. The Synderverse experiment didn’t go well, and DC and Warner Bros. have struggled ever since to piece together a cohesive cinematic universe to compete with the MCU. Even as Marvel’s cinematic output has become increasingly irrelevant, DC has floundered. Only the rare non-DCEU effort has seemed to hit the ground running: the first Joker movie, Matt Reeves’ The Batman, HBO’s excellent The Penguin series. Notably, all of the projects have a Gotham flavor. Elsewhere, aside from decent efforts like Wonder Woman or the first Peacemaker, we’ve been treated to a largely incoherent mishmash, from The Flash to Black Adam. One box office disappointment after another. Too much money spent on everything but a good script.
Gunn promised to fix this with Superman, the first film in a broader reboot of the DC cinematic universe that included a complete cast overhaul, with the exception of Gunn’s favorites – like John Cena’s Peacemaker, who made a brief appearance in Superman. But this was far from the triumph DC needed to restore faith in comic book movies. Instead of soaring, Superman crashed and burned despite the best efforts of his sprawling cast.
Too many characters, too little time
This is largely a writing problem. David Corenswet is excellent as the younger, less-gritty Man of Steel. I liked Henry Cavill in the role, but was never one of those fans who insisted he should return, that no one could replace him. At his best, Corenswet is the quintessential American Superman of yore, determined to protect the innocent and save lives. I wish we had more of that and less of the dark, stooped, mouth-to-mouth Superman this movie insists on at every turn. I also don’t buy his chemistry with Lois Lane, played with brash confidence and just the right amount of bravado by Rachel Brosnahan. As good as both actors are in their roles, any sparks that do erupt are as fake as overdone CGI. (More on that in a minute.)
Nicholas Hoult does his best work as billionaire corporate supervillain Lex Luthor, but the villain in this film is more of a hot-headed college kid than a scheming mastermind. For all his scientific brilliance—he figured out how to create a pocket universe to use as a combination research facility/secret prison for bloggers and ex-girlfriends/warehouse for his angry social media propaganda monkeys—Luthor has very few memorable moments or lines. He’s a classic mustache-twirling villain, but he lacks substance and weight. His supervillainous plan to annex half the third world and create his own kingdom is more silly than anything. And no, “It’s just a comic book movie” doesn’t excuse his ridiculous motives. Alas, Lex Luthor is just as generic and forgettable as the rest of the film.
The rest of the cast is, well, huge. Inexplicably huge. There are so many characters in this movie that we never get a chance to care about any of them. Aside from one good scene between Clark and Lois, almost every frame is constantly packed with characters, whether it’s the (admittedly hilarious) Justice Gang (Nathan Fillion’s Green Lantern, Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl, and Edi Gathegi’s Mister Terrific hog the screen) or Lex and his minions. Superman is just too overstuffed, both in terms of cast and plot. (The Justice Gang also feels disturbingly similar to Black Adam’s Justice Society Of America, and honestly it’s even more disturbing that the two movies are so similar). Mister Terrific is a fun character, although perhaps the entire Justice Gang should be saved for another movie. Same goes for Superman’s cousin, Supergirl, who should probably be left in a post-credits scene.
Many of these characters are either underused—Wendell Pierce’s Perry White is basically a cigar-chomping nerd, that’s his character—or just plain miscast. Ma and Pa Kent are the most stereotypical country bumpkins you could imagine. Worse yet, Lex’s girlfriend Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio) is a dumb blonde straight out of an ’80s movie. It’s shocking to see a woman portrayed this way in 2025, and I’m not usually one to get too flustered about these things. Her “relationship” with Clark and Lois’ co-worker Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) is frankly weird, and largely unexplained in the film. But ultimately, she’s responsible for the key information that leads to Lex’s downfall, so why portray her as such a stereotypical (and outdated) dumb blonde?
I liked Krypto, though. I really liked Krypto. Perhaps the best line in the movie is Clark telling Lois, “He’s not even a good dog, but he’s out there alone and scared. I have to find him.” It’s the only moment in the entire movie where I felt any emotion, at least any real emotion. Maybe this should just be Krypto & Superman, a movie about Superman and his puppy. I’ll watch it again.
Lex Luthor
Source: Warner Bros.
A thoroughly generic superhero movie
The overstuffed cast finds itself in an overstuffed, poorly paced plot. We begin, in media res, three years after Superman revealed his true nature to the world, three weeks after he stopped a war between a powerful Eastern European nation and its weak Middle Eastern neighbor—a war we later learn was aided and abetted by Luthorcorp. The film begins three minutes after Superman loses his first fight, and we quickly learn that it was Lex’s mysterious masked goon, Ultraman, who beat him—largely thanks to a brilliantly clever strategy that involves Lex providing Ultraman with the “moves” he needs to use to beat Superman at his own game (a gimmick that returns in the final act, leading to a particularly silly fight scene between the two supermen). I have mixed feelings about skipping the origin story.
From here, the film only pauses once or twice to catch its breath. The story moves from one action sequence to the next, at a breakneck pace, with little room for character development. Lois Lane gets a few scenes, but she’s quickly overshadowed by Mister Terrific. Superman is lost in the shuffle, less a hero forced to make tough choices and more a reactive force, tossing and turning from one crisis to the next. Whenever he’s faced with a tough choice, he easily hands off his saving grace to the Justice Gang.
The film has so many of the trappings of the superhero genre that it almost becomes unintentional parody. Everything is chaotic, but also too neat and tidy. There’s a major disaster that threatens to destroy the world in the third act, but of course, as with all conflicts of this sort, we know the world isn’t ending, so there’s little tension or suspense. The inevitable conclusion is that Superman will stop Lex and save the world, and while that’s always the case with Superman, setting the stakes so high that they’re impossible ends up feeling like there’s no stakes at all. It’s for this reason that smaller, more intimate, more personal conflicts are always more effective.
The structure of the plot falls into a narrative trap we see in all sorts of movies. Events happen, and then other events happen. The movie moves from one event to the next not because there are consequences, but because Gunn needs it to happen to get from point A to point B. When a story progresses because characters make choices that lead to consequences, which lead to conflict, which lead to more choices, which lead to more consequences, we care more about the characters and what they do. We become invested. (Matt Stone and Trey Parker note that the most important thing you can do when writing a screenplay is to avoid using the words “and then” between beats. Instead, between each beat, the words “therefore” or “but” should appear. In Superman, every beat is connected by an “and then,” resulting in little sense of cause and effect.)
Meanwhile, the events that unfold feel forced and unrealistic. When the Daily Planet team finds real evidence of Lex, they publish a damning article from Mister Terrific’s flying saucer as they escape the collapsing Metropolis. The news spreads everywhere almost immediately, even though world events like the complete destruction of Metropolis and the outbreak of a new war are also happening at the same time. Maybe I’m too familiar with how the news cycle works, but you only publish a story like this about the devastation of one of the largest cities in the country if you want to bury it, not if you want the truth to come out. And maybe I’m too familiar with the power of the plutocrats, But I don’t see any news articles leading to Lex Luthor’s downfall. I just see him turning it into fake news, hiring a lawyer, and walking out of jail free, with his army of monkeys working overtime to change public perception.
A Tonal Disaster
Of course, you might think this means that Superman is just another example of pop optimism, as Man Of Steel always was. But not only has Gunn overdone it in his quest to take the Synderverse to a dark and gritty direction, he seems to have failed to find the right tone. If this is supposed to be an optimistic Superman movie, why does it still feel so dark and pessimistic?
If anything, Corenswet’s Clark Kent’s optimism seems to be forced into the plot despite its nature. Superman is mostly depressed, angry, beaten, canned, or arrested. We learn that his biological parents on Krypton weren’t exactly great. They’re basically just Viltrumites (the Kryptonian aliens from the excellent Prime Video series and graphic novel Invincible) who sent their son to Earth not to protect the people, but to rule and dominate them. He’s supposed to “take as many wives as possible” to spread his superior genes. This leads to a pretty lame “secret harem” joke.
The film’s weirdly cynical nature is at odds with its supposed optimism, and the constant jokes only make it worse. Sure, there are plenty of funny moments, but that humor is completely out of place for Superman. I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy, but while Gunn’s constant sarcasm and sense of humor fit Star-Lord and his crew perfectly, it felt oddly out of place in a Superman movie. Tonally, this movie is a mess. It doesn’t help that you never really care about any of these characters like you do Rocket, Groot, Gamora, or Drax.
There’s nothing like Superman in this movie. Superman never feels special. You could replace him with any other superhero in this movie and it would be just as effective. Any attempt to make this “alien” a role model for immigrants ultimately falls flat, a political message thrown in without any conviction. There’s no conviction here.
An assault on the eyes
Really, the only thing Gunn seems to be really committed to with Superman is its oversaturated aesthetic. While some of the action scenes are fun and well-choreographed, I found the overall film a bit jarring. I’m glad it’s colorful, but it has a cheap, “this is a commercial” color palette that I find jarring. There are too many dizzying wide shots. The CGI is aggressive and overused. Some scenes, like the fight scene set on a pocket universe antiproton river, are closer to cartoons than live-action, and not in a good way.
The reuse of John Williams’ score from Richard Donner’s 1978 film is also a bit cheesy. I think I would have enjoyed just putting the score in the trailer and having a completely new score for this film. The soundtrack is also a mixed bag, especially compared to Gunn’s previous films, although I do like the closing song, “Punkrocker” by The Teadybears featuring Iggy Pop. That song will haunt me for days.
Between the overwritten plot, the over-extended cast, the neat and tidy resolution to the conflict, and the flashy visuals, this is a Superman reboot that screams generic superhero movie at its best. DC needed a Superman that could really fly, and instead we got a predictable, mediocre, weirdly mediocre movie that was mostly just painfully mediocre. James Gunn’s fingerprints are all over this movie, and I think that’s the biggest problem. We needed a more serious director to make Superman fly, and a script that dug more seriously into its universal themes of goodness and heroism, rather than just another superhero movie filled with half-baked dialogue and corny plots that we’ve come to expect from the genre.
